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I still read the site every so often, but it's gone from one of my main sites that I read religiously to one that I forget about for a week or two.

The level of the articles don't even warrant skimming the summary in most cases, let alone reading the comments or actually commenting myself. Part of it is that my interests have diverged and part of it is that Slashdot has seriously lost any edge it ever had.

I can see why they feel the need to freshen up the design -- and it's not like it's ever been strong on a design front -- but the beta is atrocious and once I can't avoid it I doubt I'll ever be back. Slashdot may have outlasted Digg but I suspect it will share the same fate.

From what I've read (including BengalsUF's comments, which seem to be the only authoritative source for the case), it sounds to me like Mr. Childs was taking extreme security precautions.

It's been mentioned several times that the network devices were configured to not store their configs in NVRAM or to wipe the configs if password recovery was used. I personally think that is a bit much, but I could see people I've worked with over the years arguing for this in order to prevent the configs from being retrieved by an attacker (and then analyzed and used to attack the rest of the network).

So once you've gone that far, you have to have a way to legitimately store and reload the configs when the inevitable failure occurs or an update is required. But if you just put the configs in CVS somewhere, then that becomes the security hole people can attack. So encrypting them and requiring multi-factor authentication to access makes a certain amount of sense.

As I said, I think it's going a bit far, but if you really really really want to ensure security of a critical piece of infrastructure, that's one way to do it. The way Mr. Childs went about it didn't scale beyond him (another common failing in small environments where the team size = 1), and maybe was too limiting to really be practical, but I don't necessarily think it equates to a matter of ensuring job security as has been claimed.

Video games aren't like other forms of entertainment. Paul McCartney's old albums are regularly updated for new mediums (tapes, CDs, etc.) and are fundamentally comparable to new albums made today minus some audible differences in production.

A video game made in 1988 may still be great, but there are much higher barriers to it finding a modern audience:

1. It may be difficult to run on modern systems (or at least require a level of knowledge -- e.g. what is ScummVM -- that makes it harder to access than a modern game for the uninitiated).

2. It may be so dated from a graphics, interface, or gameplay mechanics perspective that someone coming to it fresh will not enjoy it.

3. It may not even be possible to legally acquire; unlike movies and music, where old releases are often available alongside new releases, old games disappear from shelves.

Sure, there are exceptions. GOG.com, ScummVM, buying something on Ebay. But you have to already have an interest in exploring or revisiting older games.

Game designers are celebrities within their field, not within society. Paul McCartney is a celebrity because of his musical contributions, but he also is immediately recognizable to millions of people who may have never heard his music. Richard Garriott is a celebrity only to people who know his work -- which, as mentioned, has not continued to be relevant in recent gaming history.

And that in a nutshell is why someone as important to early gaming history as Richard Garriott was may not roll off the tip of someone's tongue today.

He also hasn't made a noteable game since 1997 (or 1999 if you consider Ultima IX noteable), at best 11 years ago. While I instantly know who Lord British is, he is far from a household name to someone who was 3 when Ultima Online launched.

geek4 sends in an analysis indicating that Microsoft may have the most to lose if hedge-fund operator Elliot buys Novell. (The eWeekEurope piece is based on a longer and geekier writeup by Andy Updegrove on how the mechanics of unsolicited tender offers can play out in the tech world.) To avoid meltdown or asset-stripping, Novell can try and find a preferred bidder — a company with some interest in running Novell as a business, and preferrably a tech company. Or another company may make a move independently. But who might that be? A couple of analysts have suggested IBM, Oracle, or SAP. These all have problems... Microsoft is in a similar category, with one added problem. ... Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution. If Novell falls to bits, then Microsoft's efforts to gain open source cred pretty much disappear with it. It's something that would have been impossible to imagine a few years back, but if we're looking for someone to prop Novell up, Microsoft would now be a prime candidate."

alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures."

I think it's conceivable that the world's population could have its quality of life raised across the board so that there are not people living in abject poverty who are literally starving to death, although it would be quite difficult and especially problematic to do so without causing the abject poor and working poor to effectively combine (meaning a reduction in quality of life for those presently at the low end of the scale but above the very bottom).

However, raising the quality of life so that literally no one has anything to lose (as you put it) doesn't seem practical. If everyone is a millionaire, then that will be the new poverty as the value of things will adjust accordingly based on their scarcity as already happens.

Put another way, someone will always have more than you in one way or another. More possessions, more political power, more social influence. If you feel that this is unbearable (as in someone who is legally permitted to obtain an abortion) or that you have no power to change this within the system (as with a tyrant suppressing political freedom) then people of a particular disposition will gravitate towards terrorism as a means to achieve their goals. Not to mention those who possess a strong enough dislike for another group of people based on religion, ethnicity, or other factors that their mere existence is offensive to you, which is even more difficult to solve as there is no middle ground.

Your records belong to you. You can request them (and depending on the hospital / doctor's office, they may claim you can only receive copies or that they will only send them directly to your new healthcare provider) at any time and take them with you.

The long and short of it is that a lot of these devices have pretty poor performance, and can get away with it because they're used on 1.5mbps lines. However, there are some out there that are decent.

Of course, there's the build-it-yourself approach with m0n0wall or pfSense or something else. With a spare PC laying around you'll likely get reasonable performance, although electricity usage is quite a bit higher than an appliance.